Where dreams begin: ACC's advanced ESL course helps build careers

By Isaac Groves / Times-News

Published: Monday, March 17, 2014 at 05:54 PM.

She also tailors lessons to her students’ professional goals, giving them aptitude tests to find out what they are best at and getting them to talk about their dreams, which is not something people do everywhere.

“A lot of them are embarrassed that they even have dreams,” Nelson said. “I tell them, ‘That’s the name of the game here — know what you want to do, and achieve it.’”

Building confidence is also important, Nelson said. A lot of these students do not realize how far they have come, and without a transitional class, might “hide out” in ESL.

GRAHAM — With Zakhar Vorsulev and Franck Bognon coming from different sides of the world, the odds were against them becoming classmates.

At Alamance Community College’s Dillingham Center, they took a new, advanced English-as-a-second-language class aimed at getting them into new careers.

Vorsulev is from southern Siberia, and Bognon is from Ivory Coast in West Africa.

Both had studied English back home and taken ESL classes at ACC.

“Eventually, I just found myself bored in the class,” Vorsulev said.

They were invited to what their teacher Joan Nelson calls a “graduate-level” course to take students from survival English to work English.

It is something new in ESL, and teachers from Guilford Technical Community College have come to see what ACC is doing.

There is no certificate — students graduate when they test out of ESL and move on to college classes or a job.

“My job is to push them out of the nest,” Nelson said.

Both Bognon and Vorsulev have “graduated.”

Bognon, 35, is in the pre-nursing program, and Vorsulev, 32, is in the culinary program.

Both got educations in their own countries, which helped them qualify for the visa lottery to become legal U.S. residents.

Vorsulev studied marketing, and Bognon studied business, but they were not that interested in those subjects.

“It’s not what I wanted to do,” Bognon said. “In my country, it’s very, very difficult to study medicine.”

English-as-a-second-language classes have been around for years. They tend to focus on the basics.

But for the most part, those classes do not get students college- or career-ready. Nelson’s class aims to do that, but it takes more than learning grammar.

There is a lot of grammar, but Nelson said her focus is on career skills. A lot of immigrants can speak English well, but answering phones at work takes another level of fluency.

Even Vorsulev and Bognon, with their excellent, but accented, English, like to text.

It is also hard to read fast enough to keep up with college classes in a second language. Nelson teaches practical skills like speed reading for comprehension, and assigns lots of writing to build those skills.

The class is small, at about a dozen students, so Nelson can focus lessons on students’ weaknesses.

She also tailors lessons to her students’ professional goals, giving them aptitude tests to find out what they are best at and getting them to talk about their dreams, which is not something people do everywhere.

“A lot of them are embarrassed that they even have dreams,” Nelson said. “I tell them, ‘That’s the name of the game here — know what you want to do, and achieve it.’”

Building confidence is also important, Nelson said. A lot of these students do not realize how far they have come, and without a transitional class, might “hide out” in ESL.